Fresh Market Editor Matthew Enis with Supermarket News dives into the pros and cons of labeling dairy products in grocery stores. He offers up some interesting insights, and this is your opportunity to share your opinions, as well. Link here to read the entire column and voice your opinion in the comments section.

Earlier this month, U.S. Sens. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Al Franken, D-Minn., introduced a bill that would extend mandatory country-of-origin labeling to all dairy products. All three senators have said that a new COOL law would help American dairy farmers compete more effectively in U.S. supermarkets and would help them weather the current economic crisis facing the dairy industry.

In a press release, Sen. Feingold added that “with the discovery last year of widespread use of melamine in Chinese dairy products, consumers deserve to know whether the milk used to produce the dairy products they buy meets the high safety standards used in the U.S.”

Passage of this bill might make some great campaign ads, but it will do very little to help U.S. dairy farmers, and it won’t make the U.S. food supply any safer. According to data from the International Dairy Foods Association, the U.S. did import more than $1.2 billion of dairy products during the first six months of 2009. Fluid milk accounted for $3 million of that total. Yogurt, butter, ice cream, dry milk and condensed milk combined for about $70 million more. To put this in perspective, according to recent IRI data, annual U.S. sales of these products total more than $20 billion. In the U.S., the vast majority of these products are already produced domestically.